alt Hacker NewsJobless tech workers are being left out of San Francisco's AI boom
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I applied to Anthropic a few years ago but didn’t pass the bar on their coding test. I read recently that if I had been hired in that period, my equity would be worth over 40 million based on their current valuation (and i remained employed the entire time there)
It’s hard to mentally reconcile that if I had performed better on a few coding tests a few years ago i would be 100x wealthier than I am today. Whether or not you met the right bar, got into the right company at the right time is the difference between a tedious endless struggle and securing your family’s wealth for the rest of the century.
These layoffs are happening because the entire tech industry is sinking all of its free cash into AI capex. H1B abuse and offshoring have both existed for decades, and neither are the proximate cause for these layoffs. If you’re blaming immigrants for this, you are either doing so in bad faith, or you are embarrassingly gullible.
Sure, but let’s not forget that ~90% of the Bay Area does not work in tech. They are all being left out of the AI boom, similar to how they were left out of every tech boom before it. Don’t see why we need to specifically weep for these ex-FAANG engineers because they couldn’t get into OpenAI or Anthropic.
> Demand for software engineers in the Bay Area has fallen 42% since 2022, according to Lightcast, a labor-market analytics firm. Jobs tied to AI-related IT and computer science, meanwhile, have jumped 37%.
How much of this is just everything IT-related being rebranded as AI?
And SF tech workers don't even have a hukou that gives them the right to go back to their village.
China has a "return to village" program for people who didn't make it in the big city. Here's the propaganda version of that.[1] Return to the land. Go back to being a peasant. Survive on 0.3 hectare? That's a back yard, not a farm.
[1] http://english.scio.gov.cn/in-depth/2024-07/30/content_11733...
"A group of more than four dozen laid-off workers gathered at 11 a.m. on a Monday to hike Mount Tamalpais, a majestic peak overlooking the San Francisco Bay. They descended the mostly deserted trail in groups of about a dozen, led by Basem Istanbouli, a former Google employee sporting a bucket hat and a pair of toe shoes."
I'd rather hike than sling JavaScript for a bunch of finance goofs, but that's just me.
This is not the experience I have with the SF tech scene. I moved to Canada from SF to raise a kid and even now have a lot of startups offering jobs on a TN visa or similar. There are days when I feel like taking the offer as the Canadian tech scene and opportunities are non existent.
> Now he’s parsing job titles like “AI strategist” and “AI engineer,”
I have seen things like this. They often just look like backend swe jobs though? Are people getting these kinds of titles without masters in ML? Or pivoting somehow?
> Now, one of the most popular jobs in tech may be forward deployed engineers,
This is true? Are people pivoting to this really?
Sounds like they just enjoy the early retirement.
Unless you fit a certain very narrow demographic and career profile, SF is a shitty place to actually live. I understand that some people have an emotional or family attachment to it but honestly most of them would be way better off in the long run if they just moved. We can debate all sorts of hypothetical government policy changes that would make the city more livable and affordable, but come on, realistically most of those aren't ever going to happen. At some point you have to accept reality.
EDIT: Downvotes incoming so I am blocked out of responding to comments for 8h.
San Francisco is one of the most expensive places on earth. $180k/yr doesn't go very far in San Francisco specially if you want to have a family. Dual income becomes pretty much mandatory and if one of those incomes are lost, things start to get tough.
Pretty much anywhere else in the US (outside some parts of the East coast) and almost anywhere in the world, $180k/yr is an amazing salary.
Tech was already moving towards asynchronous working but AI just exponentially accelerated asynchronous work. Bulk of the software in 2026 has been written, reviewed and tested by AI (whether the HN crowd likes it or agrees with the practice, or not).
"AI" has, and will, suck out capital out of the market - this, coupled with non-zero interest rates is putting companies under pressure where cost savings is the top, if not one of the top priorities.
So these two conversations are happening in every board and executive room in San Francisco:
- SMB/startups: Can we go faster with less people if we load up on tokens? Yes.
- MNCs/Large Orgs: Are our engineers out of Austin or Asia equally productive with AI assistance? Yes.
So the decision is simple: San Francisco's expensive engineers and tech workers are useful in a rapidly contracting niche. They are still valuable for startups based out of SF (but the startups are just hiring less than they used to). They are still valuable for rapidly expanding companies based out of SF that are not yet having the cost discussion - Anthropic and OpenAI are certainly hiring.
But rest of the companies are just hiring equally talented workers out of Austin or Vietnam, for way cheaper.
The highly skilled will continue to get hired but the median worker out of San Francisco is being replaced.
That said, AI is making it increasingly easy to start your own business. I certainly have been encouraging people to find their own customers before their (ex)employer forces them to.
There’s a lot to unpack about this, from this is being result of capitalism (or hyper capitalism in US) and not AI, all the way to this would not have had happened if software or tech people were “street smarts” rather than just logical smart, they basically shot themselves in the foot, they went crazy on automating their own work to the point when the boss saw the work is too automated to need them, they got fired, meanwhile if you look at other sectors (healthcare, education, legal, etc.) they immediately lobbied to prevent such case, they allowed the use of AI but they are still the gate keeper of it: “oh you need to use AI in a healthcare matter?! Nope, can’t do that without a licensed practitioner!!” It’s simply to make sure they are not going to be jobless within 5y.
Solutions? Well, it varies from how invested you are to solve it, are you open to tame capitalism and dismantling the concept of infinite growth and minimizing expenses while maximizing profits? Or are you open to regulate the tech market just like other sectors, and mandating a human gatekeepers regardless of how smart the AI is? There are many solutions but I highly doubt any will be done in the current political atmosphere.
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There are H1B armies of regular people, doing regular jobs, that require no critical skills, making decent wages, at the cost of the American worker/Graduate. Thank your Gov for allowing corporations to fill their ranks with slave labor. It all starts with a particular kind of CEO, CIO/CTO and it guts the technology department of American employees.
https://archive.ph/hTPql